The Madman's Guide to Miracles

There was no light.

Aseren stood beneath a sky without a single star, staring at the empty expanse above him. He looked down at his hands, turning them over once before glancing at the endless stretch of dark stone around him.

"...Did I die?"

His voice sounded strangely distant. Aseren swallowed and looked around again.

"Is this the afterlife?"

The endless dark was empty. Almost.

His chest tightened.

"Did he take over me? Did Vaelgor..."

He stopped himself. The thought alone made his stomach twist. Maybe this was what happened when the heart finally took control. Maybe his body was already gone, and this was all that remained of him.

Aseren pressed his palm against his chest.

Thump.

He froze.

A second heartbeat.

Then—

CRACK.

The stone beneath him split. Aseren stumbled backward.

"What the hell is going on?"

The fracture raced across the ground. The surface buckled, and something began forcing its way upward.

Aseren stared. For a moment, his mind tried to make sense of the shape emerging from beneath the stone.

A giant.

That was what it looked like.

Then it kept rising.

The shape twisted until the idea of a giant stopped making sense. Blackness surged upward like a storm given flesh, constantly shifting as if reality itself couldn’t decide what it was supposed to be. Aseren caught glimpses of limbs, eyes, something resembling a head, then lost all of them when he tried to focus.

His vision blurred.

"Huh.."

The pressure was suffocating. Aseren dropped to one knee.

Ether poured from the creature in suffocating waves. It was so dense that his soul recoiled from it instinctively. This wasn’t something he could compare to anything he’d felt before.

It was ancient.

And it was hungry.

Aseren looked up. His mind struggled to process what stood before him.

This wasn’t the shape he’d seen when the heart was implanted.

This was whatever had been hiding behind that shape.

"Just what am I... looking at?"

The real Vaelgor.

Aseren’s breath caught.

"No."

He scrambled backward. Then he turned and ran.

He didn’t know where the Heartscape ended. He didn’t know where he could hide. He only knew that staying anywhere near that thing meant dying.

His footsteps hammered against the stone.

Behind him came a sound that made his entire body lock up.

Aseren glanced over his shoulder.

Something black filled the sky.

His eyes widened.

"Wait—"

The world vanished.

So did Aseren.

Aseren opened his eyes with a violent gasp. His body hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. For several seconds, he could only lie there, coughing and staring at his hands.

They were shaking.

Aseren slowly touched his face, then his chest, feeling his heartbeat beneath his palm.

"...What?"

His brows drew together.

The last thing he remembered was running. Then Vaelgor had reached him. There had been that impossible shape, the crushing pressure, and then...

Nothing.

Aseren swallowed.

"No."

He shook his head.

"That doesn’t make sense."

The surroundings finally caught his attention.

The starless sky was gone.

Countless thin strands surrounded him, stretching in every direction. Some passed close enough to brush against his shoulders while others disappeared into the distance, extending so far that Aseren couldn’t see where they ended.

He slowly turned.

There were thousands of them.

Maybe more.

The sight left him completely dumbfounded.

"What am I looking at...?"

Aseren reached toward one. His fingers stopped just before touching it.

The answer surfaced in his mind.

Soul Threads.

The word brought another realization with it.

"...The Heartscape."

His eyes widened.

"This is my Heartscape?"

Aseren looked around again, trying to reconcile that thought with what had just happened.

He had been killed.

There was no denying it. He remembered the pain. He remembered his body coming apart.

Yet somehow, he was standing here again.

His palm returned to his chest. The heartbeat was steady.

Aseren stared at it for a moment before whispering, almost as if saying it aloud might make the situation easier to understand.

"So what happened to me?"

Something moved beyond the threads.

Aseren’s head snapped toward it.

The pressure returned.

His expression fell.

That presence.

Vaelgor.

"Found you..."

The distorted voice finally spoke.

Aseren froze.

The words seemed to come from everywhere at once, vibrating through the walls and crawling beneath his skin.

The darkness parted, and an impossible mass began moving through the web of Soul Threads.

Aseren’s stomach twisted.

It had followed him.

The realization barely settled before instinct took over.

Aseren turned and ran.

The threads blurred around him as he sprinted into the distance, searching for anything that might lead away from the creature behind him.

There was nowhere to escape.

It was utterly hopeless.

The threads stretched endlessly ahead.

Aseren glanced over his shoulder.

The black shape was already closing the distance.

His foot caught against something.

He stumbled.

A moment later, Vaelgor reached him.

Pain tore through his soul.

Aseren screamed.

Then everything went dark again.

Aseren’s eyes snapped open.

For a few seconds, he stayed where he was, cheek pressed against hot stone as he tried to understand why he was still alive. His body was whole again. His leg was fine. His fingers moved when he told them to.

"...Again?"

The word barely left his mouth.

Aseren slowly pushed himself upright and looked around the room. The orange glow still leaked through the cracks above, casting faint light across the walls. Something about the place felt familiar now, like a memory he’d almost forgotten.

His stomach sank.

Two deaths.

He remembered both.

The first had been quick. The second had been worse. Each time, his soul had been torn apart before everything went dark, only for him to wake somewhere deeper inside this strange place.

Aseren rubbed his face.

"Fuck..."

Then the thought came.

The wiki I’d plagiarized for my own novel...

Soul Ingress.

His eyes widened.

The Soul System. Soul Threads. The Heartscape. Soul Weight. The rules surrounding Soul Ingress.

I knew this power system well enough.

A foreign soul entering a living body required an opening. Extreme pain. Broken sanity. Physical death. Something had to weaken the host enough for the intruder to establish itself.

The Seeding.

Aseren’s expression tightened.

"That’s what he’s doing."

Vaelgor wasn’t simply trying to kill him.

Every time Aseren died, his soul was being forced further open. Every death gave the Elder Beast another opportunity to push itself deeper.

Aseren’s stomach twisted.

"Soul-Straitening..."

He remembered the explanation.

Two existences forced into the same vessel. The stronger existence gradually crushing the weaker one until the host’s claim over its own body disappeared.

Aseren stared at his hands.

"...And I’m the weaker one."

There was no point pretending otherwise.

The Ether coming from Vaelgor alone had nearly crushed him. Whatever power the Elder Beast possessed belonged to an entirely different level.

Aseren looked around the room again.

This was his Heartscape.

His soul.

That had to matter.

The countless Soul Threads from the previous Gate came back to him. They had stretched through the darkness farther than he could see, connecting parts of his existence he couldn’t even begin to understand.

Aseren clenched his fists.

"If this place belongs to me..."

His eyes moved across the walls.

"...then there has to be something here that belongs to me more than it belongs to him."

A tremor passed through the floor.

Aseren froze.

The orange light flickered.

The doorway darkened.

Vaelgor was coming.

His heart began pounding again.

Aseren forced himself to breathe.

It’s a war of attrition.

The thought settled in his mind.

Vaelgor couldn’t simply destroy him and walk away. If killing him were enough, Aseren would already be gone.

The Elder Beast wanted something.

His body.

His soul.

His place in reality.

That meant it needed to take something from him first.

Aseren’s eyes narrowed.

"So I just have to figure out what keeps me here."

The doorway exploded.

Aseren threw himself aside as a black limb crashed through the room, sending fragments of stone across the floor. He hit the ground, rolled, and scrambled back onto his feet.

The pressure nearly buckled his knees.

He ran.

This time, his eyes were searching as he moved.

The walls.

The floor.

The faint orange light.

The memories buried somewhere inside this place.

Anything that could give him an advantage.

Anything that was truly his.

Because if this was his soul, then Vaelgor had entered his territory.

Aseren just had to survive long enough to figure out how to use it.

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